David Coateshttp://www.davidcoates.net
Political Blogger and Author of Answering Back and Making the Progressive CaseMon, 09 Mar 2015 12:51:09 +0000en-UShourly1Weighing the Arguments on U.S. Military Action against ISIShttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/EZslW41tO1w/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/03/09/weighing-the-arguments-on-u-s-military-action-against-isis/#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 12:51:09 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1452

In an earlier posting, the case was made that what we desperately need in contemporary America is a national conversation about the appropriate direction of our foreign policy, and about the adverse impact on conditions at home of excessive military activity overseas.1

As the military campaign against ISIS builds in both Syria and Iraq, that national conversation becomes ever more essential.

There are strong arguments, now widely circulating in the general media, making the case for the persistence (and indeed the intensification) of US airstrikes against ISIS targets. But equally there are strong arguments, less frequently heard perhaps, for why the United States should not continue, and should certainly not intensify, those airstrikes. With public opinion still seriously divided on the issue, though now beginning to slightly drift in favor of military action,2 there is genuine value to be gained by calmly setting the two sets of arguments down together, the better to be able to see their relative strengths and weaknesses. Hence, what follows:

THE CASE FOR A SUSTAINED MILITARY CAMPAIGN TO “DEGRADE AND ULTIMATELY DESTROY” ISIS

So why should the US military be engaged in a sustained air campaign against ISIS strongholds in Syria and Iraq? The official justification for that engagement was the one given by the President in his September address launching the anti-ISIS coalition and announcing limited military action in the Middle East. It was that “if unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region – including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland,” Barack Obama told his national audience, “ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies” and “posed a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East – including American citizens, personnel and facilities.”3 Hence our determination “to degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.

Behind those generalities stand at least these six specific reasons for military action against the Islamic State.

ISIS constitutes a new level of horror. This threat is not like any other. It is even more barbaric than al Qaeda before it. If unchallenged, its regimen of beheadings, burnings and crucifixions will take us all back into the worst practices of the Middle Ages. As the President put it in that September address: “In a region that has known so much bloodshed, these terrorists are unique in their brutality.” Or, to follow Graeme Wood in his recent influential article in The Atlantic: the “fighters of the Islamic State” are “authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war” (which happen to include “slavery, crucifixion and beheadings.”)4 Something uniquely nasty is afoot in the world – something not really seen since the 1930s and the Nazis, and something that has already taken American lives in a grotesque way – something that needs to be dealt with effectively and with all due speed.

ISIS is determined to build a caliphate. That affects directly the interests of more moderate Arabic forces that are allies of ours. It even threatens non-Arabic countries way beyond its borders. As Graeme Wood said in that Atlantic article, ISIS “already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom,” and if his reporting is right, because it is a caliphate, “It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as ‘offensive jihad,’ the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims.”5 “Following takfiri doctrine,” Wood argues, ‘the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”6 If true, the parallels with Hitler – which Wood draws – are obvious, and the required response equally unavoidable.

So much US effort has gone into building a new Iraq: to see it dissipated so quickly raises questions about why all that sacrifice was necessary; and not fighting on lets down those who fought before. The United States military lost over 4000 soldiers as casualties of the Iraq war, and sent home at least 32,000 more who were physically and mentally damaged. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost at least $1.26 trillion from start to finish (and the overall “war on terror” maybe $8 trillion): so to see the Iraqi “democracy” that was left behind – not to mention its army – disintegrate so rapidly before the ISIS onslaught, is simply too much for many to bear.

The normal “pottery barn rules” apply. We broke it. We own it. We cannot walk away now. Even those reluctant to admit US culpability in destabilizing pre-2003 Iraq often quietly concede that American intervention is the backdrop to the rise of ISIS, and that in consequence the United States has a particular moral responsibility to somehow stop the rot. At the very least, as the war critic Noam Chomsky had it, defeating ISIS must start “with the US admitting its role in creating this fundamentalist monster.”7 There were even echoes of this argument in the President’s September 2014 explanation of why he, of all people, was willing to reconstruct a Bush-like coalition of the willing to engage in extensive military intervention in the Middle East – that while he was adamant that “American forces…will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq” he was equally clear that American forces were needed there “to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.” But why that need, if the United States did not already bear some underlying prior responsibility?

ISIS is a global force. We cannot ignore it. We can only resist it. Appeasement did not work in the 1930s, and it will not work again now. ISIS is not simply focused on Iraq and Syria alone. Instead,“the ISIS cancer has metastasized, as the al Qaeda cancer did before it. The two are now competing to see which can kill more people faster.” As the readers of The Wall Street Journal were told in February, ISIS’s “often stated objective is to ‘remain and expand’;” through a complex global strategy “across three geographic rings.” “An ‘Interior Ring’ …Iraq and…the Levantine states of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine…; the ‘Near Broad Ring’ that includes the rest of the Middle East and North Africa….; and ’The Far Abroad Ring’ that includes the rest of the world, specifically Europe, the U.S. and Asia.”8

ISIS is waging a Holy War against Christendom. Like earlier crusaders, the United States must wage holy war in return. As Bill O’Reilly told his “Factor” audience in February, echoing the imagery of a clash of crusaders used by the ISIS leadership itself, “the Holy War is here and unfortunately it seems the president will be the last one to acknowledge it.”9 And it is a very serious and dangerous war – one that we must win over there before we lose it over here. Indeed, according to Senator Lindsay Graham at least, “the chance of getting attacked goes up every day.”10 Which is why, as he put it on Fox News Sunday in September, “”this presidentneeds to rise to the occasion beforeweall get killed here at home.”11

THE CASE FOR SCALING BACK THE U.S. MILITARY CAMPAIGN AGAINST ISIS

The arguments for scaling back US military involvement in the fight against ISIS call many of the pro-war claims into serious question. The counter-arguments include at least these.

We inflate ISIS by attacking it. ISIS is a regional force. We only make it global by fighting it. As with Al Qaeda before it, a military response by the United States falls directly into the ISIS play book. After 9/11, the United States had little choice but to pursue bin Laden – into Afghanistan at least, if definitely not into Iraq. But with ISIS, where is the immediate threat to US security that makes an all-out war necessary? There is none. As the former head of MI6 told a British audience in the summer of 2014, “the west was not the main target of the radical fundamentalism that created ISIS” since “the conflict was essentially one of Muslim on Muslim.” Giving ISIS what he called “the oxygen of publicity”12 was bound to be counter-productive; and so it is proving. But how could it be otherwise, given what we now know about the self-sustaining nature of an open-ended “war on terrorism.” When that war began, there were some 1500 acts of terror recorded throughout the world as a whole. In 2013 there were nearly 10,000. Sixty percent of those remained concentrated in just five countries – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria – but did so now in a list that also includes New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Paris. As Christopher Ingraham reported, “After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising sharply.”13 So in such a context, it is worth asking the question. Do we make ourselves more secure by waging air-strikes on an enemy that has goaded us into war, or do we make ourselves less secure?

Going to war with ISIS gives terrorists too much influence over American foreign policy. And we were goaded into this war. ISIS knows that its status is improved in radical Islamic circles if it is attacked by the United States. At a critical moment we may come to regret, we let ISIS’s exploitation of social media determine our foreign policy. The execution of American journalists undeniably required a military response: something commensurate to the act. It did not, of itself, require an open-ended commitment to full-scale war. Video of the murder of James Foley was released on August 19, and of Steven Sotloff on September 2nd. The decision to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS in a military campaign that John Kerry conceded “may take a year. It may take two years. It may take three years”14 came just eight days later. That was way too quick. Joe Biden promised to pursue ISIS to the gates of hell; and when he said that, many of us were equally incensed. But that commitment to a new and prolonged war was made in the heat of a moment of deep national outrage; and once made, could not easily be pulled back. But just because such a commitment was made, it does not mean that it was automatically either right or wise; and in truth, it was neither. The gates of hell are, after all, an extremely long way away, and getting there is going to be extraordinarily costly in both human and financial terms.

Do we really want to endure a series of endless wars? We know about those costs because we have already visited the gates of hell twice since 9/11: first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. So to attack ISIS in the manner proposed by the President effectively opens up our third Middle Eastern war in less than two decades, and yet another huge military endeavor in what is increasingly proving to be a semi-permanent American condition – namely war itself. Just think of how many wars America has fought since 1945; and ask yourself just how many of those have we actually won? The President’s request to Congress does set a three-year limit to the authorization to use military force on this occasion; but it still seeks that authorization, and it cannot by itself guarantee that, once given, the authorization will not also be regularly renewed. Indeed, it seems more likely than not that it will be renewed, because mission creep appears endemic to military engagements of this kind. Even the Afghan war – supposedly entirely over for US forces by 2014 – is now drawing US military personnel back in again.15 That war was not a success. Nor by any meaningful standards was the invasion of Iraq: so why should this new one be any different? We don’t honor our own dead by increasing their number in more futile fighting. And we don’t do our existing military personnel any favors by pretending that they could take on another Middle Eastern ground war on their own. If Lindsay Graham wants that ground war, he should be out there arguing for the return of the draft. The fact that he isn’t tells us exactly what we know: that talk is cheap in Washington, in a country which ultimately has no stomach for unending military adventurism abroad.

This is not our fight alone, nor is it our fight to lead. The battle with ISIS is primarily a fight between Muslims anchored firmly in an Islamic world. It is in consequence “an ideological war,” that, as Fareed Zakaria has properly argued, “America must watch, not fight.” If ISIS is to be defeated, that defeat will have to come from other more moderate Arab forces based in the Middle East itself. The King of Jordan, among others, is very clear on that. “This is not a Western fight,” he told Zakaria, ‘this is a fight inside of Islam where everybody comes together against these outlaws.” He wants “international support and involvement, but is wary of Western troops.”16 And well he might be: for when western armies lead the fight, their very presence helps discredit the moderate local forces they are there to support, by allowing them to be presented by their local critics either as tools of American imperialism or as too weak to fight alone, or as both. ISIS knows that. That is presumably why they have worked so hard to provoke an American military response. The former US soldier Emile Simpson got it right in ways that Lindsay Graham so far has not. Drawing on his military experience in Afghanistan, he argued just two days after the Obama address that, “the lessons of the past decade suggest that a clearly bounded extension of US military action means taking responsibility at most for the initial phase, not the permanent defeat of ISIS in which the west should play only a supporting role.”17 And even that role is better orchestrated through existing international institutions rather than through ad hoc coalitions of the willing. NATO is certainly available for that purpose even if the UN Security Council is not.

Right now we are locked in a series of contradictions: fighting a war of choice initiated by a president hitherto keen to reduce America’s role in the world;18 supporting the Saudi’s when their modes of punishment are as barbaric as those of ISIS;19 and condemning Iran when Iran is part of the fight against ISIS.20 The starkest example of that contradiction occurred on the very day that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before the US Congress, implying the need for military action against Iran. Simultaneously, The Wall Street Journal – on its front page – reported the beginnings of an Iraqi army offensive against ISIS outside Tikrit. It reported assistance from an outside power, “throwing drones, heavy weaponry and ground forces into the battle.”21 The outside power was not the United States. It was Iran. The grounds forces were Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The major external ally to the United States in the military again against ISIS – the Sunni radicals – is currently, Shiite Iran – the very country that Netanyahu would have us believe is our major enemy in the region! He might be comfortable solving that conundrum by telling members of Congress that “when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”22 But the sounder lesson to be drawn is surely the one we learned the hard way in Iraq after 2003: namely that the trick in Middle Eastern quagmires is not to thrash about or to charge forward. The trick is rather not to enter them in the first place; and if inadvertently already in, then to slowly and carefully step out.

We are being whipped into a new panic by an unholy alliance between ISIS and Fox News. Both are presenting events currently underway in Syria, Iraq and now Libya as moments in a Holy War, and as a replay of the Crusades. We need calmer counsel to prevail. Cleveland is not under attack. By endlessly criticizing the President for not labeling ISIS as “Islamic terrorists,” the journalists at Fox News regularly slide over the extent to which ISIS’s main barbarities are inflicted on other Muslims – Shias – and discount the regularly demonstrated condemnation of ISIS by leading Islamic institutions and figures. And when O’Reilly, Hannity and their kind quote Graeme Wood’s Atlantic article with such enthusiasm, they do more that stoke the flames of a growing Islamophobia here in America. They also reinforce what is the greatest weakness in the Wood piece: the impression created there that the ISIS reading of the Qur’an is the only possible accurate one, and that Islam as a whole is “literalistic, backward-minded, and arcane”23 when in truth it is none of those things. The President is right. Terrible things have been done in the past in the name of all religions, including Christianity; and terrible things are being done now by ISIS to other Muslims, and not just to Christians, in the areas which ISIS controls. So there is literally nothing to be gained by blaming every adherent to a particular religion for the excesses of a terrorist few. The alliance between Bill O’Reilly and the ISIS leadership is indeed an unholy one. The war they mutually advocate is equally unholy; and we need to say so.

THE ELECTORAL POLITICS SURROUNDING THE MILITARY CAMPAIGN

It is because the arguments for scaling back US military involvement in the fight against ISIS are so much more convincing than those for persisting in our present course – let alone more convincing than those for increasing our military involvement – that current political developments in and around Washington DC should concern us greatly.

The counter-arguments to war need to be aired – in as strong and regular a manner as possible – precisely because of the electoral and governmental consequences of staying silent. For we are into the next presidential election cycle, whether we like it or not; and the dynamic now emerging there is one that will – if not reversed – take the United states inexorably into yet more military adventurism in the Middle East. Why? Because each Republican presidential hopeful is currently outbidding the others in their hawkishness, with Lindsay Graham setting the pace; and we can expect Hillary Clinton – vulnerable as she is on Benghazi – to inevitably follow. And you only have to look at the list of foreign policy advisers surrounding the Republican front-runner – Jeb Bush24 – to see that the neo-cons are on the way back, and to realize that we face the possibility of history once as tragedy and twice as farce. Are we really happy to see Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton back in positions of influence in Washington DC, after the mess they left behind the last time they were there? I sincerely hope that we are not.

Between now and the general election in 2016, we can expect leading Republican politicians to treat any manifestation of Presidential restraint by Barack Obama as further evidence of why ISIS is growing, rather than as a rational response to a complex problem that cannot be solved by American military means alone, let alone as a rational response to a complex problem that military means deployed too extensively can only make worse. We can also expect leading Democratic politicians to tack to that Republican wind, even though to do so will be both immediately electorally damaging and, over the longer period, internationally dangerous. We saw what happened to Democratic candidates when the whole party tried to distance itself on the President ahead of the mid-terms. We don’t need that distancing again.

What we need instead is a growing and sustained voice – within and beyond the Democratic Party – pressing for a resetting of the structure and practice of the anti-ISIS coalition: shifting its leadership into the hands of Arab governments; putting local military forces at the heart of the fight; redirecting American efforts into denying ISIS access to global social media; and establishing sharp (and ever increasing) limits on both the direct and indirect involvement of US military personnel in the fighting on the ground.

2In October 2014, 57 percent of those polled by Pew Research approved of the US campaign against ISIS. Four months later, that approval rating was nearly two Americans in three. Public support is not growing uniformly, however. Two out of every three self-professed Democratic Party voters polled in February still opposed the sending of ground troops to fight Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, and 46 percent of all those polled still believed that relying on too much military force to defeat terrorism simply created more hatred and more terrorists. But in that same poll, 47 percent thought using overwhelming military force was the best way to defeat terrorism and 49 percent favored the possible use of US ground troops in the battle against ISIS. (Source: Pew Research Centre, Growing Support for Campaign Against ISIS – and Possible Use of U.S. Ground Troops, February 24, 2015: available at http://www.people-press.org/2015/02/24/growing-support-for-campaign-against-isis-and-possible-use-of-u-s-ground-troops/

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/03/09/weighing-the-arguments-on-u-s-military-action-against-isis/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/03/09/weighing-the-arguments-on-u-s-military-action-against-isis/Hammocks and Ladders: The Poverty of Republican Thinking on the Poorhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/9M2QDn2zrc4/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/27/hammocks-and-ladders-the-poverty-of-republican-thinking-on-the-poor/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 14:08:25 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1449‘The American Dream has become a mirage for far too many.” (Jeb Bush)1

These are early days in the upcoming run for the White House in 2016, but already – among would-be Republican candidates at least – we see evidence of a tentative willingness to explore a set of contemporary ills that normally only figure in the election rhetoric of their Democratic opponents. These ills are the current high levels of income inequality in the United States, the contemporary squeeze on middle-class living standards, and the persistence of widespread poverty at the base of the American income pyramid. The ills are different, but they are related; and it is intriguing to see leading Republican politicians beginning to explore, however tentatively, the causes and consequences of some or all of them.

Ted Cruz, for example, reported in January as chuckling every time he hears “Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton talk about income inequality because it increased dramatically under their policies.”2

Scott Walker, the same month, insisting that “under Obama, government assistance has become less of a safety net and more of a hammock;” re-echoing Paul Ryan’s often quoted suggestion that the US welfare safety net “is at risk of becoming a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”3

Rand Paul worrying that disability benefits were being wasted on people with anxiety and back pain;4and

Jeb Bush, tentatively putting his toe in the policy water and promising more thoughts later, but at least conceding now that “tens of millions of Americans no longer see a clear path to rise above their challenges” and not because they lack ambition or hope, or are lazy or see themselves as victims.5

Then there is Marco Rubio, who to date is by the most impressive of the group on these issues. Indeed, his American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone ought to be compulsory reading for the rest, if only to raise the quality bar in the discussion to come. For Rubio – like Paul Ryan in the last presidential round6 – is well aware that poverty has complex causes that are worthy of study, and is even prepared to concede that the problem of poverty can be partially alleviated by intelligently-designed public policy (in his case, by – among other things – a reformed Earned Income Tax Credit.) But then, again just like Paul Ryan before him,7 once the complexity of the causes of poverty has been conceded, Rubio quickly cherry-picks just some of those causes for privileged treatment. One is the general failure of public policy taken as a whole: as he puts it, “The failure of government-centered command-and-control liberalism to lift the poor and sustain the middle class is apparent as never before.”8The other is the inability/unwillingness of far too many American families to teach their children proper values. “To succeed in life,” according to Rubio, “you don’t just need skills and a good job. You need to have values like hard work, discipline and self-control. No one is born with these values. They have to be taught by family and faith. But today we face a serious erosion of family life in America. Millions of children are growing up in unstable homes in which they are not taught the values necessary for personal and economic success.”9

I

In consequence, the result of the Rubio ruminations on the declining availability of the American Dream to more and more people is, at most, a tantalizing political dance of the kind we might legitimately expect later from the others. It is a dance that takes readers off into the center of American politics when discussing the consequences of contemporary poverty, only then to sweep them quickly back to safe and familiar conservative ground as soon as the argument shifts from description to prescription. For although there is no overarching unity of thought and policy in any of these Republican rumblings yet – just a shared willingness to comment and in Rubio’s case to analyze –nonetheless predictable and longer-standing conservative understandings of the causes of poverty and income inequality10 already ghost the conversation between the presidential hopefuls. That is true even of the Rubio volume.

One such understanding is that poverty is something that people largely bring upon themselves. This is the often-heard “poverty is voluntary” thesis: the insistence that people inadvertently choose poverty both by the things they do (drop out of school, get pregnant early and so on) and by the things they don’t do (like work hard, or get ahead by education and effort). As we have argued in these columns before,11 Republicans tend to hold an “agency” view of poverty rather than a “structure” one. Poverty is not something that happens to you regardless of your best efforts. It is something you bring upon yourself by lack of that effort. Such an agency theory of poverty then puts ultimate responsibility for the existence of poverty back onto the shoulders of the poor themselves. It is the result, in Rubio’s words, of their failure to recognize and implement what he terms “‘the success sequence.’ First get an education, then get a job, and don’t have children until you are married.”12

Another understanding common in current Republican conversations about poverty and its causes is that if any external structural barriers do get in the way of people lifting themselves out of poverty – barriers pulling incomes down and creating welfare traps that block the move from dependency to self-reliance – those barriers are invariably constructed by the government itself. This is the old Reagan refrain that government is a big part of the problem rather than a big part of the solution; and that in the war on poverty, poverty won. It did so in no small measure, so the argument runs, because of Washington DC’s propensity for the excessive taxation of incomes and the burdensome regulation of enterprise. In the Republican litany, market forces do not create the poor. It is those who interfere with markets who do. Or, as Rubio has it, discussing one frustrated would-be entrepreneur: “big government’s complicated rules are stopping him from going back into business for himself. Its tax and regulatory policies are crushing innovation and investment.”13

A third understanding, invariably visible in Republican discourse on poverty and its discontents, is that the best way to raise incomes for those at the bottom of the income ladder is to raise the level of incomes for everyone, including those at the top. The premise here being that a rising tide raises all boats and not just big ones. You don’t help people at the bottom of the income ladder, so the argument runs, by discouraging those at the top of that ladder from enjoying the product of their entrepreneurial success. As Rubio has it, “Government can help – and government can certainly hinder – but it’s the entrepreneurs, the strivers and the risk takers who create jobs….If we lose sight of that fact, we will have driven the final nail in the coffin of the American Dream.”14

In general Republican thought, poverty is not something caused by society into which some people are unfortunate enough to fall. Rather poverty is something people fall into by their own failures, and it is also something that they can leave behind by climbing the ladder of success. If poverty persists, it is not because that ladder is somehow absent. It is rather that poverty persists whenever political and social conditions conspire to prevent a sufficient number of people from climbing the ladder of success with all the levels of skill and vigor necessary to the task. And the big criminal here, for Marco Rubio as for many other Republicans, is invariably the federal government itself: “Government,” as he put it, “has succeeded in trapping far too many people in poverty as a way of life, and it has not done nearly enough to help Americans escape poverty.”15

To which it is worth responding by observing at least this.

II

The way in which you solve poverty partly turns on how you define it. Poverty can be understood in absolute terms, as a certain level of income; or it can be understood in relational terms, as a form of exclusion from the mainstream of modern life.The European Union defines poverty in these latter terms, as occurring to those earning less than 60% of median income: on the argument that those with less than average incomes are systematically excluded from styles of life taken as normal by the rest of their fellow citizens. Here in the US, though there is now a robust debate on how to measure poverty more accurately/adequately,16 for the moment poverty is still defined in absolute terms: as a certain sum of money income (depending on your size of family) that fails to provide its recipients with a basic basket of essential goods. The EU poverty number goes up as incomes go up. The American poverty level goes up only as prices go up (it is inflation-indexed). The American figure is also extremely low – currently $24,028a year for a family of four. As the President said in his State of the Union Address in January, “if you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it.”17 Then see if you like it. Not many of those surviving on so little presumably do.18

Defined in that absolute fashion, however, poverty is the United States is both extensive and entrenched. Its causes are also multi-faceted.Broadly one third of those officially poor in the United States are poor because of the low wages they earn as full-time/part-time workers. A third are poor because they are involuntarily unemployed in an economy in which they are still more people seeking work than jobs available for them to fill; and a final third are poor because they rely entirely on modest levels of welfare payment (from Social Security to food stamps). The total numbers here continue to be striking – not least the large numbers of Americans dependent on food stamps and the low number of dollars that food stamps currently make available to them. 46.2 million (November 2014) for the first number: $133.07 per month on average for the second. Wal-Mart may be earning PR points right now for raising its minimum wage to $9/hour, but as recently as 2013 the economy’s largest private employer was reportedly paying the majority of its full-time employees less than $25,000 a year.And job growth in the economy may at last be recovering, butthat can be of little comfort to the still nearly one-in-three unemployed workers trapped in long-term unemployment,19 or to the more than two million children living with them.20

Yet the vast majority of the currently 48 million Americans living at or below the poverty level – certainly those working full time for inadequate wages, those seeking employment in the midst of recession, and many of those forced back onto welfare dependency – still possess the very values of hard work and self-reliance to which Marco Rubio attaches such importance. They hold these values but still remain trapped in poverty, so it can hardly be an “absence of values” fault.21

III

Linking the delivery of the American Dream to the metaphor of the ladder is ultimately misleading. It is one of the ironies of contemporary American politics that the notion of “the American Dream” now so beloved of the Right was first deployed in the 1930s by a Communist Party keen to emphasize the Dream’s non-availability to Americans trapped in the Great Depression. But before the 1930s, regardless of what the Communist Party claimed, it was not unreasonable to think of America as a fluid society in which social mobility was easier than in Europe – for white males at least – precisely because nineteenth-century America lacked a rigid class structure anchored in a feudal past of the old European kind. But that rags-to-riches route to the American Dream is now increasingly denied to modern Americans by the massive inequalities of income and wealth built up by the American form of Late Capitalism itself. Social mobility is currently higher in Tory Canada than it is here. Republicans often point to the Bill Gates of this world to reinforce their claim for American superiority and exceptionalism. But in doing so, they fail to recognize that exceptions very rarely prove the rule; and they certainly don’t for most socially-aspiring Americans right now, for whom the “start an industry in your garage” route to wealth and power is increasingly closed.

In truth for most of them, it always was: for it is worth remembering that for the first post-war generations of Americans as a whole, rising living standards were less the product of individual social mobility than the result of strong trade union action successfully linking wage growth to rising productivity. It was that linkage between productivity and wages that was then deliberately broken by Ronald Reagan’s anti-union policies and by conservative right-to-work legislation: both of which so many contemporary Republicans, including Marco Rubio, continue to celebrate and advocate. Our main problem now is that, in consequence, general economic growth is only weakly linked to wage growth, because most of any income growth currently underway is monopolized by an over-privileged and selfish elite of top earners. Our problem now is that the rich have pulled up the ladder of social mobility, and taken away the rights of American workers to bargain collectively in ways that might pull it down again.

In any case, the “ladder image” in relation to poverty was always a highly problematic one. Even if there is a ladder route out of poverty, it is a ladder that enables just some people to escape low wages, unemployment or welfare dependency, while leaving the poverty rungs at the bottom of the ladder firmly in place to be filled by others less able to climb. Moreover, to suggest that people should simply climb out of poverty by their own efforts ignores the fact that the skills required for climbing are precisely those missing for many people at the bottom of the ladder – and particularly for their children: good education, good food, good clothing, and strong supportive social capital. And the implication that by climbing the ladder of social mobility a better level of wages and income security can be found, assumes that – in the economic building against which the ladder is currently resting – a number of higher floors exist, just out of reach from the poor, where wages are both better and plentiful. But these days, as you climb, there are fewer and fewer good jobs to climb to. All you meet instead is an increasingly squeezed middle class.

Wages for most Americans are rising only very slowly right now, and have been stagnant in real terms for most of the last four decades – not least because most of the better floors in the US economic building are currently being gutted by deindustrialization. You can’t get everyone out of poverty while simultaneously outsourcing to Asia the well-paying jobs on which the general prosperity of middle-class America still depends. And you do not solve poverty – for the society as a whole – by focusing policy on routes out of poverty by a hard-working few. You solve poverty by raising the base of the ladder for everyone. No matter what Republicans claim, you cannot make the American Dream a reality for the mass and generality of Americans by simply creating more ladders that reach up to the privileged few. You can only make the American Dream a reality for the mass and generality of Americans by raising the floor on which the ladders are actually set. Poverty is not something to be escaped from. Poverty is something to end.

IV

If the Republican presidential hopefuls are genuinely concerned with the plight of the least well-off among us, they will need to consult more widely than simply economists drawn from libertarian and conservative think-tanks, as apparently they are currently doing;22 and they will have to do more than talk – in the manner of Paul Ryan’s earlier report on poverty & its causes – about how government policy makes the plight of the poor worse.

They will have to recognize, much more than even Ryan and Rubio were and are prepared to do, the extent to which existing welfare policies – the ones they often seek to curb – actually ease the plight of the very poor in America, such that cutting welfare spending back will only make poverty worse. Social Security alone keeps an additional 27 million Americans out of poverty right now, and refundable tax credits at least 9 million more.23

They will have to recognize too that – to the degree that growing income inequality and poverty retention have been features of the Obama years – those features are far more the product of their own opposition to Administration policies than they are a product of those policies themselves. Obama has tried and they have blocked. It is the blocking, not the trying, that has made the plight of the poor worse.

They will also have to recognize that it is simply not the case that you exhaust the causes of poverty by pointing to family breakdown, the incidence of under-aged pregnancy, and the lack of high-school diplomas by the American poor. Factors like that help to explain whois poor, but they do not explain whythe poverty-slots exist into which people then fall. It is not all agency in play here. Structural factors are at work too. For low wages to cause anyone to be poor, there have to be low wages. For unemployment to rob people of the ability to survive without public assistance, there has to be an economy running at less than full employment. And for welfare payments to keep people poor, the payments themselves have to be disproportionately low.

And they will have to admit that the Republican fantasy of a society freed from poverty by an explosion of small business start-ups by an entrepreneurial underclass is just that – a fantasy. The small business sector has an important role to play in the creation of jobs and affluence, but in an economy dominated by large companies and scarred by massive income inequalities, poverty will only end when people working for large corporations are paid good wages again. And it will only end when a 1950s-style level of income tax effectively redistributes the surplus income of the very rich down: down to fund the schools, houses and welfare networks that are so vital to breaking the cycle of deprivation into which the children of the poor now find themselves so illegitimately locked.

This essay is one of a series on poverty in contemporary America posted on The Huffington Post. Among the others, posted earlier, are

21Republicans might push to curtail food stamp provision in the name of necessary government austerity – as they did in 2012 – but there is no getting away from the fact that as recently as 2010 severe food insecurity was the daily reality for more than 48 million Americans – or one American in seven – and that includes over 16 million children aged 18 and under.

23 Elise Gould, “Social Security Kept 27 Million Americans Out of Poverty in 2013,” Economic Snapshot, EPI, October 30, 2014: available at http://www.epi.org/publication/social-security-kept-27-million-americans-out-of-poverty-in-2013/“Without government programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance, the poverty rate would grow from 16.0% to 28.7%, causing the ranks of the poor to swell from 50 million to 90 million people.” (Zachary Goldfarb, “The best case that the war on poverty has failed,” The Washington Post, February 19, 2015)

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/27/hammocks-and-ladders-the-poverty-of-republican-thinking-on-the-poor/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/27/hammocks-and-ladders-the-poverty-of-republican-thinking-on-the-poor/The Case for Slowly Getting Out of the Empire Businesshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/_swuiKe4ZrA/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/06/the-case-for-slowly-getting-out-of-the-empire-business/#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 16:20:55 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1441If all you witnessed late last month were the speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls at the Freedom Summit in Iowa, you could be forgiven for thinking that the main thing wrong with US foreign policy these days is that, in countries far from these shores, too few people are currently being killed by American weapons.1 Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker may each be seeking to present themselves as different kinds of Republicans, but on one thing they seemed uniquely united in Iowa. It was that the US is currently failing to provide what they claim the rest of the world so desperately needs, namely strong American leadership from a president who – in Scott Walker’s words – “will stand with our allies against radical Islamic terrorists.” Apparently the current President is not standing with sufficiently resolution in that fashion.

That Republican claim is a particularly difficult one to take seriously right now. It is difficult to take seriously, given the robust nature of the military response we can now expect to the horrendous execution of the Jordanian pilot. But it was also difficult to take seriously even earlier, given that on the very same day as the Freedom Summit the world’s press carried reports of a significant escalation in the US-led air war against Islamic state militants in both Syria and Iraq. (The press reported 13 major air strikes in each country in just 24 hours.2) If those press reports were correct (and therefore the political rhetoric in Iowa was not) far from failing to kill enough radical Islamic terrorists, the US is currently heavily engaged in military assaults on ISIS positions of a sustained and unprecedented scale. Given the sophistication of contemporary US military technology, that scale of assault is presumably killing militants and their families in numbers that ought to satisfy even the most rabid Republican militarist: but as the neo-cons sweep back to influence among Republican presidential hopefuls, apparently those numbers do not!

What was strange about those air strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq was not, therefore, their lack of scale. It was rather their invisibility in most of the American media, and their capacity to proceed without any formal declaration of war by a Congress which is now fully in Republican control. It is as though the well-publicized Republican unease with the excessive use of executive privilege by this President stops abruptly at the doors of the Pentagon, even though – from people behind those doors – there are clear signs that the air assaults now underway are not defeating ISIS.3 On the contrary, evidence abounds:

that ISIS, however horrendous its practices, poses no immediate threat to the United States;4

that killing some terrorists, far from reducing their total number, simply breed others:5

that mission creep (bringing US troops into a combat role) is likely when Iraqi ground forces begin their offensive in the spring:6

that the American strategy of relying on local allies is no longer working (at least in Yemen);7 and

that the drone technology now being deployed by US forces in the Middle East is leaving even the White House open to a new kind of physical danger.8

All of which prompts the question: why go the Republican way? Why not consider instead a total reversal of course? If this third Middle Eastern war since 9/11 is showing no signs of being any more successful than the other two, why not think about an alternative strategy that shifts the US global posture from offense to defense, and from the privileging of hard power to the privileging of soft. Instead of focusing media coverage, to the virtual exclusion of all else, on the detail of this air-strike or that, maybe now is the time to discuss publicly the general wisdom of the strategy underpinning all those air-strikes. Rather than going back to Iowa, that is, why not start a national conversation instead about the advantages of slowing getting out of the empire business, and of incrementally redirecting our efforts from nation-building abroad to nation-building at home?

I

Criticizing the President’s foreign policy as lacking machismo is, of course, conventional partisan politics in each election cycle, but criticizing it for too much machismo most definitely is not. The prevailing consensus on both sides of the aisle in Congress is that the US military still needs to be heavily engaged in the Middle East and beyond. The partisan disagreement there is not about engagement, but only about its character and scale. Not everyone, however, is of that mind. There are libertarian voices on the right of the Republican Party, and progressive voices on the left of the Democratic Party, prepared periodically to challenge the beltway consensus. Indeed the President himself was once such a critic – at least of an illegitimate war in Iraq if not of a more legitimate one in Afghanistan. But such voices tend to be drowned out entirely from the mainstream media’s treatment of US foreign policy options these days: so, if only to alter that substantial imbalance slightly, it is worth thinking through what “getting out of the empire business” might actually involve.9

One thing it will not involve is being either crazy or impractical. It is not crazy to imagine a less militarist role for the United States abroad when we remember that such a role is only, at most, seven-and-a-half decades old. It is a role that has been put together and sustained within the lifetime of many of our more elderly fellow citizens; and something that is so recent cannot be as firmly set in stone as the advocates of an expanded military role claim. Getting out of the empire business is also not impractical when you recognize the war weariness of this generation of American voters. We are now more than a decade away from the horrors of 9/11. We have tried two Middle Eastern wars in our attempt to defeat “terrorism,” and it is widely recognized – within the United States and abroad – that both attempts have broadly failed.10 The Taliban are currently resurgent in Afghanistan,11 and ISIS has sweep through much of the Iraq that American troops “liberated” in 2003.12 Instead of quick military solutions of the kind offered by the Bush Administration at least, we have seen our men and women in uniform bogged down in military and cultural quagmires made more intractable by their presence, while themselves bearing a terrible and on-going burden of lost lives, lost limbs and lost minds. There is no stomach in America for doing all that a third time around.

II

To advocate “slowly getting out of the empire business” is not to be isolationist. Nor is it to be reckless. It is instead to argue for a roll-back in US military activity abroad that is both moderate in pace and deliberate in execution – a roll-back which is both of those things for reasons that are partially political in character and partly economic.

Politically,the roll-back will need to be measured and moderate so that allies abroad, long used to large-scale American aid, are not immediately abandoned and exposed to any rapidly-escalating danger. It will also need to be moderate and managed because in our years of global dominance we made many enemies, and they will not vanish overnight if we decide to pull our troops home. Indeed initially that roll-back may very well embolden them, so that our liberty will initially require extra vigilance. And the roll-back will also need to be moderate for domestic electoral reasons. As we have recently seen in a spate of examples from Benghazi to the Crimea, any serious attempt by a cerebral President to reflect publicly on the necessary limits to American global power will quickly be denigrated by his political opponents. It will be denigrated as both a sign of American weakness and a cause of the very limits on which the President is quite properly reflecting.13

Economically, the roll-back will need to be measured and moderate because, without the careful orchestration of a move from the production of arms to the production of much-needed civilian consumer goods and social infrastructure, large-scale American unemployment will inevitably follow. But we know that money spent on civilian output has a larger multiplier effect than money spent on defense procurement.14 We know that large-scale demilitarization was successfully effected after World War II, and that the American experience then is still available as a model for similar military demobilization now. We know of small examples already underway that are successfully converting parts of the U.S. war economy to a civilian one.15 We know of vast veterans’ needs better served by health-care spending than by armament procurement.16 We know that American soft power is always more effective when deployed in place of hard power rather than as its corollary. We also know that military intervention abroad invariably creates more terrorists than it destroys, so that ultimately the only way of breaking this cycle is to replace military intervention by a different and more culturally-sensitive type of American presence overseas.

III

If U.S. foreign policy is to be reset in so fundamental a fashion, a series of specific policies need to be put in place and then implemented in an incremental but consistent manner. What those policies might be is exactly what needs now to be publicly and extensively discussed. Among them may well be some/all of the following:

the bringing back to the United States of the vast majority of our military personnel;

a significant reduction in the number of our bases overseas;

the incremental rundown of all covert operations;

new limits on our ability to interfere, covertly or otherwise, in the internal affairs of other sovereign states;

a revamped willingness to operate under the auspices of international agencies like NATO and the UN; and

the resetting of our defensive walls closer to home: first on the far shore and eventually on the near shore of the two oceans that divide us from the Eurasian landmass.

None of those changes taken individually – nor all of them taken as a whole – necessarily involve any undermining of America’s long-term capacity for effective defense. Indeed, such policy changes might well enhance that long-term capacity if accompanied by a retention/strengthening of the United States’ naval superiority, and the associated ability of the Pentagon to deploy rapid reaction forces abroad in the event of a direct assault on US overseas personnel. But placing more and more American troops overseas since the events of 9/11 has not made us safer either at home or abroad, not least because we have yet to get away from policies based on the double-standard at the heart of all past imperialisms: the core double standard that allows us to wage covert wars against others while being outraged when others wage covert war on us. That core double-standard did not ultimately save earlier empires, and it won’t ultimately save us.

All this resetting of America’s security policy is entirely possible for “a continental power bounded by oceans to the east and west, and unthreatening neighbors to the north and south.”17 All, indeed, are changes that others have canvassed before. There is currently a myriad of plans already in existence for defense cuts of considerable size, achievable without undermining national security: plans that vary from the very modest to the super-ambitious. The Center for American Progress produced one in 2012, Rebalancing Our National Security, taking the U.S. defense budget back to 2006 levels.18 Chalmers Johnson produced another in 2010 with a more radical intent. He called it 10 Steps Towards Liquidating the Empire,19 ten steps that were not dissimilar in kind from those proposed by Rachel Maddow in her widely-acclaimed study of Drift. As she wrote in 2012, “none of this is impossible…We just need to revive the old idea of America as a deliberately peaceable nation. That’s not simply our inheritance, it’s our responsibility.”20 It is indeed.

IV

Before anyone throws up their hands in total horror at the very thought of the United States pulling back from so globally active a military stance, we would all do well to remember that prior to 1992 the United States was well used to operating in a bipolar world, one in which significant parts of the global order lay outside America’s direct sphere of influence. We should have no wish to return to the tensions of the Cold War; but even so, there is value in the recognition that only since the Soviet Union collapsed has the United States been the one global superpower, under pressure to act directly in one theatre of war after another. There is value in recognizing that, far from wanting to sustain the US in its global policing role, we would do better to welcome the emergence of a new multipolar world, to recognize our limits within that emerging multipolar world, and to begin to live within those limits.

There is value, that is, in breaking free from (and emptying our minds of) the notion that American soldiers and politicians need to keep on doing globally in the next seventy years what they just happen to have been doing globally for the last seventy.21 For when we set contemporary US foreign policy against a much larger canvas than that – a canvas taking in the whole of American history and the grandest of sweeps of our history to come— it should become clear just how unusual the last seventy years have been, and how poor a guide they therefore are to how America should position itself globally in the seventy years to come.

14 Robert Pollin & Heidi Garrett-Pelier, The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: 2011 Update. PERI, December 2011: available at http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/0b0ce6af7ff999b11745825d80aca0b8/publication/489

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/06/the-case-for-slowly-getting-out-of-the-empire-business/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/02/06/the-case-for-slowly-getting-out-of-the-empire-business/The President’s “Queen’s Speech”- Too Little, Too Late?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/nd5sLFnpvnU/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/21/the-presidents-queens-speech-too-little-too-late/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 21:41:02 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1392The United Kingdom and the United States are divided by more than a common language. They are divided too by the different character of the political systems prevalent in each. They do however share a propensity for political theater. The UK has a major example of that theater once each year, when the Queen gives the speech from the throne, announcing the program of her government for the year to come. The United States has another, as each January the President comes before Congress to report on the state of the union. But as political theater, each is rather different. The Queen might pretend that the policies being previewed are hers, but at least her audience knows that what she announces her government will then deliver. The US President needs no such pretense. The policies being proposed in the State of the Union are undoubtedly his, and his alone. The pretense being practiced in the SOTU is that what he proposes, Congress will allow him to implement.
They will not. They rarely do, and almost never without amendment. They will particularly not allow implementation this time, when the new Congress contains a House of Representatives with the largest Republican Party majority in living memory and a Senate newly returned to Republican control. In so Tea Party-driven a legislative body, no Democratic president could find majority support for progressive policies, however moderate; which makes it all the more bizarre that the policies laid out in Tuesday’s State of the Union were not in any way moderate by contemporary American standards. Instead, the President stood before a hostile Congress and proposed that they worked together to tax the richest Americans and surcharge the largest financial institutions to the tune of an additional $340 billion in order to ease tax pressure on the American middle class, provide greater tax credits for the purchase of childcare, and enable low-income Americans to attend community colleges free of charge.
So why go that route, and why now? The “why now” question is particularly intriguing, because this renewed Presidential populism was entirely missing from the White House presentation of its policy priorities for the vast majority of the first half of the President’s second term. Had it not been – had Barack Obama the populist been more vocal earlier – the currently embattled President might not now be facing a fully-hostile Congress. The recent mid-term election that so strengthened the Republican Party in Congress attracted only 36.4% of the US electorate to the polls – the lowest percentage since 1942 – and did so because potential Democratic voters stayed away in droves. And they stayed away precisely because the President was playing the conservative bi-partisan game from which he is now so visibly breaking. The nature and timing of this policy shift (too little, too late) is then – to put it politely – extraordinarily hard to understand!
So why do it? Partly it seems to be an issue of political framing: setting the Democratic Party up for another populist run for the White House in 2016. Partly it seems to be a negotiating ploy – getting the progressive case in first before the Republican alternative is fully formulated and laid on the table, Maybe too, it is an issue of legacy: Barack Obama wanting to go down in history as a progressive president blocked by conservatives, rather than as an ineffectual president wasted by his own conservatism. And it may even be partly an issue of self-delusion. No American President can go to Congress six years into his term, and say that the state of the union is anything other than strong. But the reality is that the state of the American union is currently anything other than strong. Deep economic weaknesses (not least trade deficits, stagnant wages, long-term unemployment and entrenched poverty) remain unaltered and unaddressed. Profound foreign policy weaknesses (not least a third war in the Middle East) remain on-going. These are weaknesses that helped Obama to be elected in the first place, and they are weaknesses that will remain long after his term of office is over.
If the two speeches – The Queen’s Speech in June and the President’s SOTU in January – are any guide, David Cameron’s economics and those of the US President are not exactly the same. The two leaders clearly share an interest in easing the costs of childcare and in stimulating more infrastructure investment. But it was the Queen, and not the President, who committed her government to “an updated Charter for Budget Responsibility…to ensure that future governments spend taxpayers’ money responsibly,” and to “continue to cut taxes in order to increase people’s financial security.” And it was the President, and not the Queen, who seven months later told Congress that “we need to set our sights higher than just making sure government doesn’t halt the progress we’re making,” and urged lawmakers to “commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort” by closing “loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one per cent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth.”
So the substance of the speeches diverged in important and significant ways that continue to set the US and UK onto slightly different political paths – a real one in Cameron’s case, an aspirational one in Obama’s. But the two speeches – the one in June and the one in January – did have at least one important thing in common that it is worth noting here. Given the outcome of last November’s mid-term election in the United States, and the Republican leader of the Senate’s insistence, even before the State of the Union Address, that “with all due respect to the President, he doesn’t set the agenda,” it is now the case that neither of the two people making the speeches – neither the Queen nor the President – will actually be calling the important policy shots in the months and years ahead. Perhaps in this regard at least, right now UK and US politics are not that different after all!

Written to be posted (January 22nd) on Speri.comment, the political economy blog-site of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute based at the University of Sheffield in the UK

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/21/the-presidents-queens-speech-too-little-too-late/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/21/the-presidents-queens-speech-too-little-too-late/New Year Reflections on the US Global Role.http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/UQYv_1J0ldA/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/01/new-year-reflections-on-the-us-global-role-2-docx/#commentsThu, 01 Jan 2015 05:41:45 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1367The first hours of a new year are always an ideal time for people across the globe to reflect on their contemporary condition. They are an ideal moment to look back, in the hope that serious reflection now can improve conditions going forward. And it is particularly vital that we in America take this moment of reflection as this new year begins, given the enormity of the impact of our condition on the rest of the global order.

In the last days of 2014, the Obama Administration made much of the formal ending of the war in Afghanistan – the longest war in American history now supposedly finally over.1 But in truth it is not finally over. Significant numbers of American troops are still deployed in Afghanistan, and will be for the foreseeable future; and in any case the Afghan war is simply part of a wider set of military engagements by American forces in the region that remain on-going. As the Obama Administration claims closure in Afghanistan, it continues to wage war in the Middle East – America’s third such war since 9/11 – leading the military campaign against ISIS, even though the US commander of special forces in the Middle East is recently on record as admitting that “we do not understand the movement, and [that] until we do, we are not going to defeat it.”2

For as James Fallows commented at length in the current edition of The Atlantic,3 in spite of all our enormous expenditure on military personnel and equipment America keeps losing wars – or if not completely losing them, then at least regularly failing to translate superior US military capacity into desirable political settlements. For far too often for comfort, the more our men and women in uniform are deployed abroad, the more intransigent seem to be the problems that their deployment is designed to resolve. America may be the world’s dominant super-power, and according to its own lights uniquely benign in that role, but the world it seeks to dominate is proving remarkably resistant to that supposedly benign dominance.

So perhaps now is a good time to ask why? What is it about our contemporary political role that makes so much of what we attempt to do abroad ultimately self-defeating? Is the American military presence abroad really as benign and as indispensable as our political leaders regularly insist that it is? And if it is, why is that not universally recognized?

I

One way of answering such questions is to note that the United States is not the first global power to experience limits on its capacity to shape events beyond its shores, nor is it likely to be the last. For the past two millennia at least, other political systems – not least those of Ancient Rome, early-modern Spain, nineteenth-century Britain, and Russia under both the Czars and the Soviets – have for a significant period of time exercised political domain over wide areas of the then known world. But unlike the contemporary United States, each of those imperial adventures eventually came to a desultory end. Power won became power lost – and often lost in both a dramatic and an irreversible fashion. If the United States is not one-day soon to repeat this standard imperial pattern of ascendancy, hegemony and decline, those who govern us now might do well to reflect upon the necessary limits of empire that these early examples of global dominance so clearly demonstrate.4 For these are limits that could one day also apply to the United States, and could do so regardless of how often conservative political commentators insist that the American role abroad is not in any meaningful sense imperial at all.

Really – not imperial at all? Well, consider America’s contemporary condition in the light of at least these four regularly-visible limits of empire.5

MILITARY LIMITS

In the end, there always seems to be a serious military problem with empires. Empires cost a lot to build and a lot to maintain: a lot in money terms, a lot in terms of manpower, and a lot in terms of political capital. Empires also invariably meet both resistance and push back from within the empire, and competition from other imperial entities beyond their borders, both of which ultimately inflate those costs substantially. This pattern of costs and resistance was very clear in the Soviet case, where ultimately the burden of Cold War competition and internal repression overwhelmed an economy stagnant for other reasons, and left the Soviet Union immersed in an Afghan war that it could not win and from which eventually it had ignominiously to withdraw. A similar pattern of imperial-overstretch brought Spanish power to an equally ignominious end in the Treaties of Westphalia and the Pyrenees between 1648 and 1659; and swept the British out of South-East Asia in 1942 and India by 1947. Empires regularly discover, that is, the truth of Talleyrand’s often-quoted remark to Napoleon “that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Armies are so much better at winning power than at retaining it; and the costs of having to continually relearn this simple truth are surely ones that this time we will do well to avoid.

POLITICAL LIMITS

Military pushback against imperial rule would appear to be only one facet of a more general feature of empires: namely that they become more difficult to rule the larger they are and the longer they last. Partly this is because geographical size and communication capacity have historically been in tension. Certainly until the age of the internet, the farther away imperial subjects were from the metropolitan center, the longer it took for information and instructions to pass between them and those who ruled them. In the past, big empires were always based on indirect rule, and that indirect rule always and of necessity provided a space for resistance: either resistance by the traditional elites doing the local ruling, or by those they ruled venting their frustration with the colonial set-up at both the local and the metropolitan level. Settler colonies in particular were supremely difficult to effectively discipline from the metropolitan center, as Britain ultimately found to its great cost in the American case.

The internet has now shrunk those distances, of course, but it has not taken them entirely away; and in any event the governance problems of empire invariably run deeper than simply issues of distance. For any difficulty the center has in controlling the periphery is normally matched, in grand global adventures of the contemporary American kind, by problems of control at (and over) the center itself. Even democratic governments with global pretensions have difficulty avoiding the emergence of an imperial presidency – one which, though democratically elected, slips inexorably into non- or even anti-democratic practices in the defense of imperial power far away from its own shores. At the height of the Roman Empire, faced with issues of this kind, the republic rapidly gave way to what was effectively a monarchy. Modern empires don’t inevitably collapse in that fashion, but they do face a similar problem of excessive executive autonomy. We need only think of the problem of executive capacity in the Washington DC of George w. Bush and Dick Cheney to recognize the persistence of that problem.

ECONOMIC LIMITS

It’s not all bad news for empires, of course. Empires in their prime also attract a lot of subsidy. They take things from peoples less powerful than themselves, and do so with relative ease because of that imbalance of military capacity. They also find borrowing resources from others outside the empire easier than it might otherwise be because the collateral asked of them on such borrowing is invariably low, relative to the borrowing capacity of non-empires. In financial as well as in military terms, that is, power and privilege goes together. However, this financial arbitrage inevitably comes at a serious long term price, for empires at times enjoy a credit rating that is too good for their own long term viability. At the very least, empires tend to end up (as in the British case) with a serious division of interests between their financial and manufacturing sectors. At the very worst (as with Spain) for all their wealth, empires still end up dependent on credit provided by bankers based in circuits of capital that lie outside the territorial reach of the empire itself, credit which if withheld leaves the imperial army unpaid and the imperial military capacity momentarily out of central control. Armies win imperial control, but it is bankers who eventually determine if it can be sustained.

Moreover, obtaining things easily because of imperial preference invariably weakens the ability of empires to generate those things themselves. It frees them from any immediate confrontation with the reality of market forces; and it alters the relative weight within their underlying economy of the sectors that manufacture things and those that merely play with money. Empires, as they succeed, invariably undermine the economic superiority on which that rise had initially been predicated. With Wall Street continuing to bounce back from the 2008 recession on a scale yet unmatched by Main Street, and with US-owned companies increasingly shifting their production off-shore in a global economy made safe for them by the US navy, it is hard not to see history repeating itself: first Rome, then Spain, England and now the United States.

CULTURAL LIMITS

Finally this: even privileged elites within dominant empires tend to wake up to the dangers of the erosion of the competitive strength of their domestic economy, if they wake up to it at all, too late. Empires rise but they also decline – sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly – in part because both their governing classes (and their central populations) come over time to believe more and more in the naturalness and permanence of that superiority. They come to take their global position of power for granted, and lose sight of the very special conditions necessary for its retention and growth. They also come to swallow much of their own imperial rhetoric, so progressively losing the capacity to understand their own growing unpopularity in far-flung parts of the empire. A heightened tolerance of war, a double-standard in relation to the legitimacy of violence (alright if we inflict it on others but not alright if they inflict it on us), even a blindness to both the violence of poverty at home and the violence of empire abroad: all these seem to be inevitable features of the culture of empire. For although the specific content of ideas and claims differs empire by empire, the general character of the imperial mindset does not. It is always a mixture of excessive hubris and growing ignorance: hubris about the intellectual or racial superiority of the imperial culture, growing ignorance about the depth and complexity of cultures on the imperial periphery. As the global reach of an empire increases, so too does its cultural parochialism. Some empires, like the British, fall in total self-delusion. Others, like the Russian, fall when that self-delusion is possible no more.

II

Some high-quality imperial scholarship clings resolutely to the view that empires are a good thing, and that the possession of one is a sign of both present and future strength.6 But the bulk of the evidence available to us on the character and trajectory of global power would suggest otherwise. It would suggest that empires grow strong only because powers around them grow weak, and that imperial stability is more a function of that continuing weakness than it is of factors exceptional and special to the global power itself. It would suggest that empires fool themselves if they think that their superiority is endemic rather than contingent, and a reflection of their inner strengths rather than of others’ external weaknesses. Take those external weaknesses away, and imperial decline seems to follow as surely as night follows day. The bulk of the evidence would suggest too that empires begin militarily strong, politically focused, economically advanced, socially cohesive and culturally dynamic; but that invariably they end up militarily exhausted, politically gridlocked, economically weakened, socially divided and culturally depleted. By almost any measure, there is plenty of military exhaustion, political stalemate, economic erosion, social division and cultural deprivation in contemporary America. Which is why – as the New Year begins, and before the detail of day-to-day politics again drowns out the space for quiet reflection – it is worth pondering whether any of that exhaustion, stalemate, erosion, division and depletion is the product of the presence in the modern world of something that we might properly recognize as an American empire.

This argument is developed more fully in David Coates, America in the Shadow of Empires

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/01/new-year-reflections-on-the-us-global-role-2-docx/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2015/01/01/new-year-reflections-on-the-us-global-role-2-docx/Taking the Imperial out of American Imperialismhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/dlmdcrPm3rs/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2014/12/01/taking-the-imperial-out-of-american-imperialism/#commentsMon, 01 Dec 2014 15:10:39 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1357“You can do many things with a bayonet, except sit on it.” (Talleyrand)

There is never a good or easy time to argue that the United States should begin to completely reset the character of its foreign policy, especially when the argument being made – as here – is that a key element in that resetting must be a reduction in the scale and role of American arms abroad. Anyone making that kind of case invariably touches a deep American nerve, so that any resulting rebuttal often moves quickly from an argument about facts to one about patriotism.

And it is a particularly difficult time to make such an argument now, for at least two very telling and very new reasons.

One is the recent arrival on the world stage of a particularly horrendous form of Islamic fundamentalism (ISIS), one so grotesque as to regularly behead its captives (including American ones). The second is the mid-term capture of the Senate by the Republicans. The first has created a new threat to less radical Islamic forces in a region long recognized as vital to American interests. The second will strengthen the presence in Washington DC from next January of neo-con Republicans in both the House and the Senate1 – a strengthening that is likely to push US foreign policy on ISIS and other forms of radical Islam in exactly the opposite direction to the one being canvassed here.

Yet precisely because of the latter, this is exactly the moment to raise in a systematic fashion the following set of critical questions. As Republican pressure grows on a beleaguered President to become even more militarily assertive on a range of global issues from the Ukraine to the Levant, we all need to ask ourselves:

Are we currently even in full control of our own foreign policy in the Middle East, or is policy being driven there by the actions of ISIS just as once it was driven by those of Al Qaeda? By launching air strikes against them, are we not actually playing ISIS’s game: winning for them a legitimacy in the region that they would otherwise lack? And even if we are not, how is it that we are once more leading what is at best only a reluctant coalition of the willing, with the US military doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for a group of nations (European and especially Arab) whose direct interest in the defeat of radical Islam is far greater than ours, but whose enthusiasm for the fight is so much less evident than our own?2 And since the current view of the American intelligence agencies is apparently that, even though ISIS is now being attacked by US war planes, it still “poses no immediate threat to the United States,”3 does the current return to extensive bombing runs in Iraq (and now also in Syria) make this third Middle Eastern incursion of US arms in less than two decades Barack Obama’s own version of a “war of choice”?4

Either way, is that military heavy-lifting actually working, or has US military intervention in the region inadvertently become part of (or a major cause of) the problem that military deployment is supposed to resolve? Military interventions invariably solve fewer problems than the neocons of this world are ever likely to admit. Remember Tallyrand’s advice to the leading neocon of his day, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Certainly, two Middle Eastern wars since 9/11 have so far failed to produce long-term political stability in either of the war zones (Afghanistan5 and Iraq6) in which they have been waged. In fact the data sets run the other way: only last month, the IEP’s latest Global Terrorism Index reported that 2013 “saw the highest number of terrorist incidents since 2000” – less than 1500 in 2000, nearly 10,000 in 2013 – with the bulk of the incidents occurring in countries in which the US has recently waged ground wars (Iraq & Afghanistan), a drone campaign (Pakistan) and air-strikes (Syria). It is data like this that then led the Institute to suggest that US foreign policy, far from reducing the incidence of terrorism in the Middle East, is actually “making the problem worse.”7 They have a point – one indeed, if The Guardian report is correct, that they may even share with at least some unnamed but heavily involved CIA operatives.8

Can the US go on affording the cost of military expenditures of the scale into which we have currently settled, given the attendant domestic problems which are in consequence insufficiently funded or not funded at all? It is not as though the US military is in any way tiny, or that curbing its budgets would somehow leave us vulnerable to stronger opponents abroad. Right now, the United States is responsible for at least 40 percent of total global military spending, and has a military budget larger than that of the next 17 military powers combined (many of whom, of course, are also our allies).9 This, at a time when our transport infrastructure is in desperate need of modernization, our trade deficit with China is at an all-time high, and we are slipping down a series of key international indicators – not least those on educational performance – for want of greater spending and renewed investment. We have so far expended $8 trillion10 on the war on terror, and as we continue to lay out treasure at this unprecedented rate, are we absolutely sure that it is the terrorists we are weakening in the process, rather than ourselves?

Is the US so benign a force globally, and so “indispensable” a nation, as virtually the entirety of our political class continues to insist? And if we are, why is there so much anti-American sentiment among the populations directly exposed to all this benign indispensability? Or are we, like every other major power, ultimately engaged in the pursuit of our own national interest, which only occasionally and accidentally involves us in doing good for others? The post-war reconstruction of West Germany and Japan often figures large in the litany of those convinced that we, and we alone, are the first non-imperial global power; but was that benign reconstruction of former global enemies the exception or the rule? In the wake of so many unsuccessful recent nation-building efforts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, and this side of so many ethically problematic covert operations waged by the CIA, it is a question that needs to be both asked and explored to the full. How benign a global force are we – or can we ever hope to be – as we send black-ops teams into at least 76 countries,11 maintain maybe 1000 military bases overseas,12 deploy drones over other nation’s airspace in both South Asia and Africa,13 and run a secret “black budget” for US spy agencies of over $52 billion: all this in 2013 alone.14

If the answer to any one of the clusters of questions set out above is as negative as some commentators15 have argued, then should we not consider, at the very least, the phased return of the bulk of US military personnel currently abroad, and the closing down of the vast majority of US overseas bases and covert operations? Is it not time to insist that the European Union pick up prime responsibility for handling expansionist moves by a resurgent Russia into territory that is on Europe’s borders but not on ours? Is it not also time to return to the institutions of the international community – especially to the UN – prime responsibility for the protection of basic human rights wherever they are challenged; and time for the United States to restore full funding to those international organizations, the better to enable them to perform precisely that protecting role?

And is it not time to recognize – the horrendous events of 9/11 notwithstanding – that what has turned most manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism from being a regional irritant into a global one threatening American security at home is the sustained US military presence (and active support for unpopular regimes16) in its region of greatest concern: the heart of the Islamic world itself?17 Beheading Americans certainly required a military response: one that was specific, measured and finite. It did not, of itself, require an open-ended commitment to degrade and ultimately destroy. If anyone needed to respond in that longer-term fashion, it was surely those countries and social forces immediately affected by ISIS. It was not the United States itself – and certainly not the United States acting to all intents and purposes entirely alone.

As policy-makers in Washington struggle with how best to respond to ISIS, they would do well to remember that the roots of religious and national conflict, across areas of the globe as contested as the Middle East, go back far in time and remain in their modern manifestations immensely complicated phenomena. If any of those conflicts had ever possessed the possibility of a quick fix, that moment was lost long ago: and now cycles of violence – whether US-initiated or ISIS-driven – are more likely to feed upon each other, deepening and intensifying the problem to which the violence was an initial response, rather than to offer a quick route to a lasting solution. Policy-makers would also do well to remember that, to the degree that political and religious divisions in an area as complex as the Middle East are accentuated rather than reduced by a sustained US presence in the region, plans to lower that presence, rather than to ratchet it up, need to be in the mix when considering how best to keep America safe from terrorism at home.

It is already one of the ironies of the Obama presidency that a candidate elected on a clear mandate to end the war in Iraq should not only have escalated the American military presence in Afghanistan before eventually drawing it down, but should also now be engaged in an air-war with ISIS that covers not just northern Iraq but also Syria. If people elected Barack Obama hoping to see the American military footprint in the Middle East reduced, they must now be sorely disappointed. That footprint is still large, and remains (under this President) open-ended.18 Vice-President Biden even promised an ISIS pursuit “to the gates of hell” if one was needed, and those gates are presumably a long way away. Which is why, among progressives and between the two main parties, the case needs to be made again for a fundamental resetting of American foreign policy into a calmer and less ambitious mold. We need to see created in Washington an overall understanding of American foreign policy that drops the claim about indispensability and returns us – as even a Washington foreign policy insider like Richard Haass has recently argued19 – to a global stance more commensurate with our actual capacities and requirements.

Such a fundamental resetting will not be easy.

It will be difficult in part because this belief that America is a uniquely benign global power – that we are the indispensable nation – is still so firmly entrenched in the entire political class in Washington DC, Democrat and Republican alike. It will also be difficult because, since the collapse of the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, it is no longer the case that half the world is closed-off to American influence and the possibility of direct US intervention. We have got out of the habit of thinking of any part of the world as literally beyond our orbit. And because we have, the problems of every part of the global order do currently end up as agenda items on the President’s desk, so that any resetting of America’s role in the world will necessarily involve a conscious decision to leave certain unsavory stones unturned (as we already do, in fact – in relation to things as important as human rights – with countries beyond our control like Saudi Arabia and China). Decisions about inaction are often as difficult to take as those about action, so neither will be easy.

It will be also be difficult to fundamentally reset American foreign policy because a huge set of institutions and networks have built up in and around Washington DC – all with powerfully expressed vested interests in the maintenance/extension of the US global role – such that any (even cautious and modest) resetting of that role will inevitably meet resistance from well-placed military and industrial sources. And finally, the kind of resetting required will be difficult because any President trying it (and that attempt is only likely to be made by a progressive-minded President) will inevitably be condemned by his/her more conservative critics as the cause of US overseas weaknesses rather than welcomed as a measured response to a set of intractable problems with deep local roots that were not directly of our making. (If you doubt that, go back and watch Republican Party hysteria on Benghazi, or the stridency of John McCain and Lindsay Graham as they put the case for arming the Syrian rebels earlier in the Arab Spring.)

But reset American foreign policy we must. The external rate of failure, and the internal costs of persistence, are now too high for America to continue on its current global course. Just as with the British Empire long ago, those who govern global powers with extensive world-wide responsibilities can always find a reason for going on just as before, never admitting that the responsibilities are now too wide to be adequately sustained. But making that admission is vital at the moment at which the scale of imperial over-reach begins to erode the economic and military superiority on which the global role was initially constructed. America is at such a moment now, which is why it is time for a new and more realistic foreign policy: one that recognizes the necessary limits of US global power and ends the current pretense that all the world’s problems are America’s to bear and America’s to resolve. It is time for less bluster and more sanity in America’s corridors of power.

These arguments are developed more fully in David Coates, America in the Shadow of Empires: to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan on December 10.20

9 According to figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011….The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.” (Lawrence Wittner, The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set on Spending on War,” posted on The Huffington Post, April 24, 2012: available at https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/23-2)

10 If you factor in the $3-4 trillion also spent on veterans, the total bill for the decade since 2001 might run to as high as $11 trillion. All this in Chris Hellman, The Pentagon’s Spending Spree, posted on TomDispatch.com, August 16, 2011: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175431/. For the Stiglitz calculation, increasing his original cost estimate in his jointly written The Three Trillion Dollar War, see Joseph Stiglitz, The U.S. Response to 9/11 Cost Us Far More Than the Attacks Themselves, posted on AlterNet September 6, 2011: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/152309

12 On this, see Chalmers Johnson, 10 Needed Steps For Obama to Start Dismantling America’s Gigantic, Destructive Military Empire, posted on AlterNet August 25, 2010: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/147964.

18 As the Secretary of State, John Kerry, put it in the wake of the President’s September 10 address to the nation (the one in which he committed the United States to “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy”), “It may take a year. It may take two years. It may take three years. But we’re determined it has to happen.” The Vice-President even swore that the US would pursue ISIS “to the gates of hell” if necessary. The Secretary of State’s remarks were reported by William Greider, “Obama’s Long War in the Middle East,” in The Nation, September 10, 2014: available at http://www.thenation.com/article/181572/obamas-long-war-middle-eastThe full text of the President’s address is at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/obamas-remarks-on-the-fight-against-isis.html

In the wake of an electoral setback on the scale experienced by the Democrats two weeks ago, the temptation to immediately rush to judgment is enormous. So also, if my e-mails and robo-calls are any guide, is the temptation to engage in yet more fundraising, as though money was the big thing of which Democrats were short. But both temptations need to be resisted. We need to throw less money and more brainpower at our politics, and we need to take our time doing both.

For defeat on the scale we have just experienced really requires a period of quiet reflection and careful conversation about the important lessons to be drawn from recent events by those keen to see a long-term reconstruction of a progressive majority in American politics. That emerging conversation is already underway, here on The Huffington Post and elsewhere; and the following thoughts are meant to be simply one contribution.

Certain mid-term lessons seem clear, at least to me if not (from what I have been reading[1]) always to everybody else.

Democrats don’t win elections by trying to be more conservative than the Republicans they are trying to defeat. As we noted in a posting last September,[2] you don’t win elections by simply playing defense, and you don’t defeat Republicans by trying to outflank them on their right. If the American electorate want to support conservative candidates for public office, there are plenty enough in Republican ranks without the Democratic Party having to put up any more. And in any case, American voters aren’t stupid. They know real conservatives from fake ones, and so are not to be fooled by a Democratic Party offering them simply a more civilized form of conservative politics than the Republicans happen to be offering at the time. The Senate candidates who distanced themselves from Obama all went down to defeat: and rightly so, because their insistence on keeping their distance from the President just played into (and helped powerfully to reinforce) the Republicans’ main argument in their mid-term campaign: namely that the problem in Washington was too active and too radical a President. Voters believing that rhetoric rightly supported Republicans who offered principled resistance to White House policies rather than giving their votes to Democrats who offered simply to slow those policies down.

Electoral coalitions that are not also governing coalitions flatter to deceive. Cruel as it may be to say now, much of the November 2008 hype to which many progressives (me included) subscribed, was just that – hype – the product of a profound misreading of what had, and what had not, just happened. The election of a black President was a critical achievement – that is not to be denied – but as we now well see, it did not by itself turn America from a racial to a post-racial society. And the election of a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate did not, by that achievement alone, provide America with a progressive governing coalition. At the time we thought it did, but it didn’t. Far more of the 2008 Democratic Party vote than we initially realized was a vote against George W. Bush and because of the financial crisis, rather than one for Barack Obama as the leader of a progressive coalition. Too many seats were won in 2008 by blue-dog Democrats capitalizing on a temporary conservative unease with the Republican in the White House. Those “conservative” Democrats in the House were quickly replaced by proper Republican conservatives in the first re-election they then faced – in the “shellacking” of the 2010 mid-terms – and their equivalents in the Senate have just gone the same way in their first moment of re-election. They were defeated, even though in their time in office many of them did (as they often proudly asserted in their subsequent re-election campaigns) slow down the pace and dilute the direction of progressive reform. We should not forget just how much of the Affordable Care Act was chipped away, during its legislative passage, by resistance from blue-dog Democrats who are now no longer in office.

Governing coalitions have to be created electorally by winning the argument as well as the immediate vote. The main Democratic candidates who won re-election two weeks ago were those who did not distance themselves from the President, but who instead maintained and re-affirmed their progressive credentials.[3] More Democratic candidates might have succeeded in that fashion, indeed, had the White House not chosen to delay its immigration initiative. That delay certainly did not save Kay Hagan in North Carolina, or even Mark Pryor in Arkansas: it simply left the immigration lobby, the Democratic Party and the President in a far weaker position as he makes that initiative now. Polls taken during and after the election show popular majorities for many key Democratic Party policies,[4] and yet in spite of that, the Republicans took back control of the entire Congress. It is quite an achievement for a political party to lose power when people agree with more of its program than they do of its opponent’s: and that rather suggests that a party confident about its positions – and willing to push them hard – is likely to win both electoral respect and electoral support. It is certainly more likely to do so than one so lacking in self-confidence that it simply chases the tail of its opponent’s policies, offering itself as a softer conservative political force rather than as an assertively progressive one.

The building of electoral support for progressive politics requires total honesty about the problems that make progressive politics necessary. Too often, as elections loom, the governing temptation is one of talking up the Administration’s achievements rather than of emphasizing just how much more needs to be done, and could be done, if Congressional support for the Administration was more secure. Building the case for progressive change always leaves its advocates open to the charge that they are talking America down, that they are unpatriotic, even that they are the cause of the very problems to which they draw attention when making the case for change. But there is no ducking this dilemma. Making America stronger by progressive reform is an argument that has to be made; and making it may actually require a critique of existing Administration policy as well as of its current Republican alternative. The case for a different, more progressive, foreign policy will be the subject of a later posting. Now it is perhaps enough to insist that the Democratic Party – as a pre-requisite for an eventual return to effective power in Washington – be entirely honest about the scale and origins of key domestic difficulties: embedded poverty, stagnant wages, hidden unemployment, lack of adequate welfare services, under-funded public education, and an inadequate transport infrastructure, to name but a few.[5] And that honesty will also require a clear recognition of how far the Obama Administration has actually failed to live up to much of its early promise. The man himself is fine, but his Administration has seriously under-performed. If it had not, many of these problems would no longer be in view.[6]

Why this under-performance? Largely because effective politics is about more than candidates. It is about programs. Yet in making that case for programs over personalities, it is likely that both the media and our own political habits won’t help; because left to ourselves, we (and the particular television channel we watch) will no doubt both remain excessively preoccupied with the comings and goings of different members of the political class. Left to themselves, the media in particular will invariably reduce politics to a matter of personalities, in a democratically-unhealthy pact with those personalities themselves. It is such easy journalism – the journalism of talking heads – but it is also a journalistic laziness that we can no longer afford to leave unchallenged. The question should not be: will Hilary run? The question should be: on what programs will the Democratic nominee who will follow Barack Obama run? And then, and only then: is Hilary the candidate most likely to pursue those programs with all due diligence? (where the answer may possibly be ‘no’[7]) In other words, one lesson of last November, and indeed of the last six years, is that progressive politics requires programs that select candidates, not candidates that select programs. For until we, the Democratic left in the United States, go through a progressive equivalent of the Republican’s Tea Party moment – until the Democratic Party base, that is, gets serious about policy choices and policy discipline – the Party might win a few elections down the stretch, but the basic status quo in this country will remain fundamentally unchanged. And where will be the gain in that?

Which is why it is now time again for a serious battle of ideas. Partly that battle will be one that Democratic Party activists are long accustomed to waging: pushing back against wholly misleading Republican claims about trickle-down economics, welfare queens, the burden of regulation on American business, climate change denial, and so on.[8] All that will be vital, but there will need to be more – more ideological struggle on at least two fronts. (1) The case will need to be made again for the important role the federal government can and must play in managing the domestic economy and in regulating the worst excesses of American business: managing the domestic economy to bring back middle-class employment and wages, and to ensure that the benefits of economic growth are felt at the very bottom of the income ladder and not just at the top; and regulating in particular financial institutions that threaten us all if they focus more on speculation than on investment, as well as transnational corporations that make excessive profits by outsourcing American jobs. (2) And the overall narrative of American political history needs to be recaptured again, by challenging (for example) the conservative nonsense that the Federal Reserve System is a problem rather than currently a major source of economic stability and job creation,[9] and by reminding this generation of American voters that the United States was at its strongest under FDR, and not under Ronald Reagan. Electorates are not simply inert phenomena. They are voting blocs molded by the political forces that appeal to them. Why leave that molding to the Republicans alone?

The temptation will be enormous – on both political activists and political candidates – to chase the rightward drift of American politics for short-term advantage, surrendering principle for expediency in some desperate attempt to hold on to the White House at any cost. But that temptation is a false one. The only way to be sure that the White House (and ultimately Congress) will stay out of Republican Party control is to stem the rightward drift from which the Republicans alone ultimately benefit. To negotiate effectively, as the English radical R.H. Tawney once told an equally embattled Labour Party in the UK, you first have to get off your knees. It is time for Democrats to stand up proudly for a progressive program to put America back to work and all Americans back into prosperity[10] – stand up proudly, risk all, and go win elections again on a principled basis.

]]>http://www.davidcoates.net/2014/11/19/the-mid-term-elections-taking-the-longer-view/feed/0http://www.davidcoates.net/2014/11/19/the-mid-term-elections-taking-the-longer-view/The American Economy at Mid-Termhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/QbSRX7X0KZ4/
http://www.davidcoates.net/2014/10/28/the-american-economy-the-reality-behind-the-numbers/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 00:14:05 +0000http://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1317It is mid-term season in America: time for the Administration to talk up the strengths of the economy. The President did so a week ago, wanting “people to know that there are some really good things happening in America.” And since in economic terms, it is also bleak mid-winter in the Eurozone, it is additionally time for a modest degree of American triumphalism. The Wall Street Journal reported the IMF forecast that way on October 7: a one-in-three chance of return to recession in the Eurozone, only a one-in-seven chance in the United States. The Europeans are doing badly. The Americans are doing better.
Really? Oh that it was that simple: but it is not. There is a dark underside to the contemporary condition of the US economy that the conventional measures of economic performance simply fail to tap. In consequence, the view from the top of the American economy and the view from the bottom are still miles apart. From the top, looking at the economy using the standard indicators coming out of Washington, the signs are all positive. The rate of economic growth is up (4.2 percent in the second quarter) and the rate of unemployment is down, now officially under 6 percent for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008.The number of job openings across the US reached a thirteen-year high in August. The overall trend of job creation is the highest since April 2006; and US median income is rising again (up 3.8 percent to $53,891 in June), underpinning a modest surge in consumer spending and borrowing.
But seen from below, the state of the economy is significantly less buoyant than the data released regularly in Washington might lead one to suppose. It is true that the rate of economic growth has quickened, but that rate is still low by pre-recession standards. In July the IMF actually cut the US growth forecast for 2014 to just 1.7 percent. The Congressional Budget Office’s in August was just 1.5 percent. These are not stellar growth numbers. The official rate of unemployment is falling, and jobs are coming back: but the numbers flatter to deceive. Too great a part of their improvement reflects a shrinkage in the numbers seeking employment – leaving the overall US labour market participation rate at less than 63 percent, its lowest since 1978. In December 2007, the participation rate was 66 percent. Since then, 8 million Americans have simply dropped out of the labour force. Had they stayed, the unofficial unemployment rate would be nearly double its current level. The number of long-term unemployed remains high (at 3 million) and so too does the number of those only able to find part-time employment (7.1 million). And the rate of job growth still falls short of the numbers required to match labour force growth, one reason why the Hamilton Project estimates that the US will not reach its 2007 level of employment, when factoring in new labour-force entrants, until mid-2019. Even more appallingly, with unemployment still so entrenched that there are 2.1 job seekers for every available job opening, less than 30 percent of the long-term US unemployed currently have access to long-term unemployment insurance.
Then there is the issue of the quality of the jobs being created: the bulk are in low-paying sectors, not in manufacturing. This helps explain that most intriguing of trend-lines in the current US economy: job creation rising, but wages – for the vast majority of Americans – remaining stuck: or where they are rising, they are still on catch-up from their levels in 2007. The median income may now be going up, but it is still short of its 2007 peak (of $55,589) by 3.1 percent. How could it be otherwise when half of all the jobs lost during the post-2008 recession were in high-paying manufacturing and construction, while since 2010 the fastest growing employment sectors have been low-paying accommodation and food sectors? The result: the annual wage in sectors where jobs were lost during the downturn was $61,637, but new jobs gained through the second quarter of 2014 showed average wages of only $47,171. This enormous wage gap represents $93 billion in lost wages. The median income might be rising, but so too (and faster) are the costs of living (not least utilities, health care, child care and higher education): and the poverty rate remains, of course, virtually unaltered.
Several things seem to follow. One is that the recovery of the US economy from the recession is at best patchy, and that its benefits are still very unevenly distributed. A second is that we will never fully recognize the depth of the economic and social failures going on around us if we continue to measure something we call economic success by simple market-based numbers alone. A third is that this is no time to crow about US superiority relative to the Eurozone. Times are bad, for far too many people on both sides of the Atlantic, for any crowing about anything.

First posted on SPERI comment, the University of Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.

It is mid-term season in America: time for the Administration to talk up the strengths of the economy. The President did so in Evanston a week ago, wanting “people to know that there are some really good things happening in America.”[1] The worst of the recession is at last behind us. Since in economic terms, it is also bleak mid-winter in the Eurozone, it is additionally time for a little American triumphalism. The Wall Street Journal reported the IMF forecast that way on October 7: a one-in-three chance of return to recession in the Eurozone, only a one-in-seven chance here.[2] The Europeans are doing badly. We are doing better. The American economy is turning around. There are good times ahead for all of us here in America.

Really? Oh that it was that simple: but it is not. The view from the top of the American economy, and the view from the bottom, are still miles apart. If we are to grasp fully the current strengths and weaknesses of our economic position, it is vital that we go beyond the hype.

I

From the top, looking at the economy using the standard indicators coming out of Washington, the signs all look positive. After all, the rate of economic growth is up, rebounding strongly from the winter doldrums, with the overall economy growing at a 4.2 percent annual rate of growth in the second quarter of 2014.[3] The rate of unemployment is down, now officially under 6 percent for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008 – and down now mainly for the right set of reasons: less than because people have stopped looking for work, more because the economy added nearly a quarter million jobs in September alone,[4] in the process putting 2014 on pace to be the “best year for job growth since the 1990s.”[5] The number of job openings across the US reached a thirteen-year high in August;[6] and the overall trend of job creation, up from around 2.1 million new jobs at the start of the year to 2.6 million now, is the highest since April 2006.[7] Median income is rising again (up 3.8 percent to $53,891 in June),[8] underpinning a modest surge in consumer spending and borrowing. By mid-2014 credit card borrowing was expanding at an annual rate of 7.4 percent, and borrowing on cars and student loans at 10.6 percent: this in an economy in which wo-thirds of whose growth depends on consumer spending.[9] Indeed “the net worth of American households is now 20 percent higher than it was before it began to decline in 2007, the Federal Reserve reported” in September.[10] Adjust that figure for inflation, and the net worth of American households is still 4 percent higher than it was before the financial crisis, one reason perhaps why September 2014 was the month when “at last more consumers say they are better off than a year ago than [say they were] worse off.”[11]

So is everything in the economic garden now smelling like roses? Sadly, the answer still has to be “no.” Seen from below, the state of the economy seems significantly less buoyant than the data released regularly in Washington might lead us to suppose.

II

It is true that the rate of economic growth has quickened, but that rate is still low by pre-recession standards. In July the IMF actually cut the US growth forecast for 2014 to just 1.7 percent,[12] the CBO’s in August was just 1.5 percent.[13] These are not stellar growth numbers. The official rate of unemployment is falling, and jobs are coming back: but the numbers flatter to deceive. Too great a part of the improvement in the unemployment numbers reflects a shrinkage in the labor force seeking employment – down 97,000 again in September – leaving the overall labor market participation rate at less than 63 percent, the lowest since 1978.[14] In December 2007, the participation rate was 66 percent. Since then, 8 million Americans have simply dropped out of the labor force. Had they stayed, the unofficial unemployment rate would be nearly double its current level.[15] The number of long-term unemployed remains high (at 3 million) and so too does the number of those only able to find part-time employment (at 7.1 million). And the rate of job growth still falls short of the numbers required to match labor force growth. The September job creation number (at just under 250,000) is one of only six months of such job growth since 2008. In the 1990s, there were 47 such months, one reason why “the Hamilton Project estimates we will not reach our former level of employment, when factoring in new labor-force entrants, until mid-2019.”[16]

Then there is the issue of the quality of the jobs being created: the bulk are in low-paying sectors, not in manufacturing. In September, leisure and hospitality added 33,000 jobs. Retail added 35,000. Employment in manufacturing, by contrast, flat over the last three months, added just 4000 jobs. This helps explain that most intriguing of trend-lines in the current US economy: job creation rising, but wages – for the vast majority of Americans – remaining stuck: and where they are rising, still on catch-up from their levels in 2007.[17] The median income may now be going up, but it is still short of its 2007 peak (of $55,589) by 3.1 percent:[18] indeed, there were 36 states in the Union, plus the District of Columbia, that saw no rise at all in the median income of their citizens between 2012 and 2013.[19] That was in part because overall, half of all the jobs lost during the post 2008 recession were in high-paying manufacturing and construction, while since 2010 the fastest growing employment sectors have been the low-paying accommodation and food sectors. The result: “the annual wage in sectors where jobs were lost during the downturn was $61,637, but new jobs gained through the second quarter of 2014 showed average wages of only $47,171. This wage gap represents $93 billion in lost wages.”[20]

So the squeeze on the middle-class is still on, inequality remains entrenched and poverty is still a daily reality for far too many Americans. The Center for American Progress’s recent report on middle class living standards contrasted stagnant wages with rising costs. As they put it, “the costs of key elements of middle-class security – child care, higher education, health care, housing and retirement – rose,” for a family with two children, “by more than $10,000 in the 12 years from 2000 to 2012, at a time when this family’s income was stagnant.”[21] Meanwhile, if the data from the Federal Reserve’s tri-annual Survey of Consumer Finances is correct, the rich continued to do very well: “incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.”[22] For the second year in a row, indeed, the 14 richest Americans earned more from their investments than the entire federal Food Stamp budget now helping 50 million Americans![23] This, in a year when the American Community Survey showed that “poverty rates were essentially unchanged from 2012 to 2013 in virtually every state;”[24] and a year in which – with 2.1 job seekers for every available job opening – the historically low figure of less than 30 percent of the long-term unemployed still had access to unemployment Insurance.[25] No wonder, then, that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen could tell a Washington conference in September that she remained concerned that “the large share of American families remain extraordinarily vulnerable to economic catastrophe.”[26] Little wonder too that, for all the hype about improving American economic performance, many Americans (anywhere between a third and a half) remain ‘unhappy, worried and pessimistic…in the aftermath of the Great Recession.”[27]

III

Currently, the Eurozone may well be struggling more. Certainly its core engine of growth, the German economy, now teeters on the edge of recession, the casualty of its own government’s excessive enthusiasm for austerity and retrenchment in its key southern European markets. But as we bemoan Europe’s problems, it is worth recognizing the scale and depth of our own; and it is worth remembering too, amid all the European gloom, that workers in the United States still work, on average, anywhere between 250 and 400 hours a year more than in their equivalents in Western Europe. 250-400 hours is no less than “an additional six to ten weeks of work a year.”[28] High-wage, low-hours Western Europe may now be struggling; but low-wage, long-hours America is not doing that much better.

Several things seem to follow. One is that the recovery of the US economy from the recession is at best patchy and that its benefits are still very unevenly distributed. A second is that we could all do with a lot more honesty and soul-searching on this both in Washington and beyond. A third is that we will never fully recognize the depth of the economic and social failures going on around us if we continue to measure something we call economic success by simple market-based numbers alone. A fourth is that this is no time to crow about US superiority. Times are bad, for far too many people, on both sides of the Atlantic. As Christine Lagarde, the Director of the International Monetary Fund, put it earlier this month, if public policy does not radically improve, the entire “global economy could be stuck on a ‘new mediocre’ growth path with high debt and unemployment.”[29]And mediocrity is an economic condition that none of us should tolerate, let alone praise.

You don’t win football games by only playing defense. And you don’t win mid-elections that way either. Perhaps somebody should remind the Democrats that winning elections, like winning games, requires you to take the game to the opposition, and to take it to them on your terms – not on theirs.

I

Political parties can’t go forward effectively if they spend all their time running backwards. But running backwards now seems to be the dominant order of the day in key Senate races as election-day looms. In my home state of North Carolina, for example – in as key a Senate race as any – the Democratic incumbent seems set on proving that she, and not her Republican opponent, is the kind of ultra-moderate politician that a southern state should send to Washington. It is apparently not the Kay Hagan strategy to boast of her closeness to the president. On the contrary, whenever her Republican challenger criticizes her for her 95% pro-Obama voting record, as he regularly does, the Hagan response is to insist on the independence of her political position and judgment – and on her reputation as the most moderate of Democratic senators and as the most bi-partisan. If the first televised debate between the candidates is any guide, Kay Hagan’s 95% voting on party lines is something she discounts rather than celebrates.[1]

She is not alone, however, in building a campaign for re-election around the damage Republicans would do if they were to capture the Senate – in Kay Hagan’s case, particularly in the field of education – rather than around the fundamental changes Democrats could introduce across a swathe of pressing public issues if they were ever again to control both houses. In a string of key races, it is the Democratic candidates, not simply Republican ones, who are currently emphasizing their distance from the President. It is Democrats who are urging the White House not to do things – particularly not to introduce major changes to the way the immigration laws are implemented, at least not in this election cycle.[2] Time and again, that is, Democratic candidates are allowing their Republican opponents to get away with the nonsense that “Washington is broken” because of Democratic intransigence rather than because of their own, and are leaving unchallenged their opponents’ assertion that the problem we face in Washington is the Democratic Party’s propensity for big government, rather than the Republican Party’s enthusiasm for small government or no federal action at all.

But parties that are running scared of their electorates don’t deserve to win elections; and invariably they don’t win them. For all that their back-peddling does is to further reinforce their opponents’ claim that the wrong party controls (in this case) the White House and the Senate. By nervously playing to some mythical middle ground, defensive parties inevitably hurt themselves more than they hurt their opponents: and they do so in a myriad of ways. For by lacking the courage of their own convictions, they immediately surrender to their opponents the framing of the contemporary political debate. In the process, they also demobilize their own base – why go out and campaign for someone who lacks the “vision thing”; and they additionally run the risk of alienating would-be floating voters by visibly putting expediency before principle. Defensive parties inevitably fall victim to the first rule of progressive politics – that you can’t negotiate on your knees.

It makes a certain kind of crazy sense, in this election cycle, for Republicans to use voting-loyalty to the president as a critique of Democratic incumbents, because Republican opposition to Barack Obama (and indeed to the First Lady) is currently so visceral as in many cases to border on the racist. Tragically, too many Republican voters right now seem to treat Barack Obama as someone to hate, rather than as someone with whom simply to disagree. But particularly in so toxic a political climate, it makes no parallel sense for Democratic candidates to respond to the charge of voter loyalty by retreating from it. That retreat simply reinforces the Republican claim that it is the President’s policies, rather than their own, which have gridlocked Washington and deepened our economic and political crisis. That retreat helps simply to demonize the President further. In such a context of conservative intransigence,[3] support for progressive policies emanating from the White House should not be denied. It should be celebrated. It should be worn as a badge of pride by Democratic candidates resolute in their opposition to Republican austerity measures and to the covert racism that informs the politics of at least part of the Republican base.

II

There is more. Defensiveness in a political party of the size and importance of the Democrats speaks to a deeper lack of confidence in their own political project – a defensiveness rooted in a growing failure, in the case of the contemporary party, to recognize and celebrate the achievements of Democrats in the past. It is not simply that Tea Party Republicans now dominate the framing of the contemporary political debate. It is also that, to a greater extent than is safe for the future of future progressive politics in the United States, they dominate the way in which today’s electorate is told about, and so comes to understand, its own political history. Ronald Reagan was not the first, and he will certainly not be the last, great American president – arguably, he was not even a great president at all – not that you would know that if all you listen to, on a regular basis, are the television programs and radio talk-shows of the Right.[4]

Ahead of next week’s PBS airing of Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts, the importance of telling historical stories, as ways of shoring up support for political achievements still to come, was underscored for me by reading Michael Wolraich’s Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics.[5]The Wolraich volume has been widely praised, and rightly so, for it accurately recalls an important moment in the resetting of modern American politics. And in the way the Wolraich argument is developed, the book has clear and present lessons for the way progressive politics need to be developed in this – our equivalent moment.

Wolraich’s Roosevelt was no temporizer with political opponents. Nor was Robert (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette, the governor of Wisconsin and then Senator, his major rival among progressive politicians within Republican ranks. Both understood (La Follette rather more clearly and earlier than Roosevelt, if Wolraich is right) that issues of social injustice and economic privilege needed to be addressed openly, resolutely, and without fear or favor. The job of political leadership – for the men who would forge the modern progressive movement – was not to broker quiet deals in smoke-filled rooms. It was to use the bully-pulpit of the presidency, and then the public attention of the political campaign, to address the major problems of the day with the seriousness and regularity that their severity required. Elections were not to be won or lost, for Wolraich’s unreasonable men, by hiding the differences between political philosophies. Elections were to be won – if not always immediately, but certainly over the longer term – by widening and deepening them: on the premise that, by taking the longer view, clear and principled political leadership from Washington could catalyze and strengthen progressive sentiment in the wider electorate. Being unreasonable in politics now could shift public understanding of what politics could reasonably become.

III

There was a moment in the Obama presidency when Barack Obama seemed to realize that. He chose, after all, to make the centenary of Teddy Roosevelt’s Osawatomie speech (“the greatest speech he ever delivered,” in Wolraich’s view) with an Osawatomie speech of his own.[6] (Rush Limbaugh called the Obama version “a Marxist attack on America.”[7]) But the theme the two men shared across the years – the danger to American democracy of excessive inequality of income and wealth – stayed as a central theme of Roosevelt’s politics to the end. It has not stayed as central to Obama’s. Too many Democrats read too many fleeting opinion polls, and urged him to back off. And he did.[8]

We need that progressive confidence, and that willingness to take the longer view, back center-stage in the last weeks of this mid-term election cycle. There is plenty of unreasonableness around in Republican circles right now, and a willingness there to link principle to policy. This is therefore no time to reach across the aisle, to broker deals with a party whose principles are so different from our own.[9] It is time for progressives to emphasize again the choice between the real alternatives now before the American people,[10] and to remind voters that America’s greatest days occurred under progressive presidents, not under conservative ones.

It is time, that is, for the Democratic Left in America to remember that elections, like football games, are only won by combining good defense with a potent attack. The occasional “Hail Mary” kick is no substitute – in politics if not in football – for the sustained presentation of a principled progressive vision for a better America. It is time to play ball.

[3] Norman Ornstein, “America’s midterms will not break the deadlock,” The Financial Times, September 3, 2014: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5acaa630-3200-11e4-b929-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3D1NJY6NE